A Conservative's Argument for Higher Education

Legislators have at this point probably heard many student perspectives about the cuts to the UC budget, and liberal reasons to fund the UCs such as "access" have made a strong showing. A question that is thus far mostly unaddressed is that of the conservative position on higher education. Both for the sake of diversity of ideas and to catch the attention of statesmen who (like me) are unmoved by liberal arguments, I discuss here the reasons why a principled conservative vision for CA
ultimately should include appreciable investment in higher education.

The first thing to understand is that what is called conservative today by statist liberals was, at its inception, called classical liberalism, and this emerged when the Western world was emerging from feudalism to industrialization and globalization. In the Western world from 1850-1880, "captains of industry" realized they needed copious numbers of at least modestly-educated employees-literate, knowledgeable of
mathematical basics, etc. As you know, even Karl Marx, the great detractor of the bourgeoisie, credited the captains of industry with creating more wealth and gainful employment than the world had ever seen before. It was the bourgeoisie who asked their national leaders to create a public education system for the masses. In parallel, civil engineering arguably became the first public university major, as the
industrial revolution had created unprecedented infrastructure needs. The state was brought into the education business for the simple reasons of collectivized investment and risk-sharing. Every company must train its employees to some degree, but the alternative to public education would be for companies to internalize the full training track of their accountants. This would essentially involve hiring six-year-olds and schooling them for ~6 years before they were ever productive-not a
tenable strategy given the great variability there would be in training success. Bourgeoisie invention of public education is in no way liberal; one of the first companies that needed a global network of educated people was the British East India Tea Company-a colonial entity and the epitome of what liberals would find offensive.

Let us fast-forward to today. As someone fortunate enough to have grown up in Palo Alto, I am acquainted with numerous entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, and now I study in Irvine, so the people in my surroundings haven't changed that much. Some things never change: these people, like the captains of industry of a century ago, have great faith in the free market and are strong believers in limited government. Among this crowd, the most popular political philosopher is Ayn Rand; incidentally, her ubermenschian outlook fits into the mould of Nietzsche's, which came about right about when the bourgeoisie (and state partners) of the era were clearly the first folks in human history with the potential to truly make the world in their image. But by and large, these people are not anarchists; the obvious question is "if they envision such a limited government but still envision its existence, what few things do they envision it doing?"

Answering this requires positing another question. Who and what creates wealth in California? Why are there robust upper-middle-class taxpayer bases in Silicon Valley, Orange County, and elsewhere? Many of these high-paying jobs are provided by businesses in computation, information technology, green tech, biotech, and medical devices, and these are major sources of wealth creation for the state as a whole. In addition to "money" wealth, their products also greatly enhance our standard of
living. As Norman Augustine pointed out in the "gathering storm" report, more than 50% of recent economic and societal progress can be attributed to technoindustry. The firms in these important industries are often started or funded by the above-mentioned captains of industry, California's job creators, whose views are accurately represented by the Joint Venture Silicon Valley Network.

At a basic level, their companies of course need higher education to train programmers, engineers, and lab technicians. But before a company becomes big and employs many, they must have a concept, a nascent idea. This is where the role of postgraduate education shines. The ideas birthing many startups and small firms, such as California Stem Cell, Shrink Nanotechnologies, and Palantir, were born in the UC system. The venture capitalist class in part relies on universities to create their investment opportunities. While not every grad student will have an idea
worthy of starting a company around, the grad students that do start companies need highly skilled labor. There are revolutions under way in computing, for example, with both light-based and quantum computing being hot areas of development. When these ideas become the next Google or HP, they will employ people with bachelor's degrees, but right now, these labors need physics and CS PhDs. Biotech firms, meanwhile, want people with PhD training to fulfill the bioinformatics and systems biology needs of their research and development workflows; most UC PhD students in
these areas successfully seek industry positions upon degree conferral. In short, the motivations of the job creator classes from 1870 generalize to 2010: they want a strong K-PhD pipeline because without it, their ventures simply cannot run. Because of the current sorry state of the high end of this pipeline, for owners of startups on the technological cutting edge, free-market assumptions about labor allocation are flatly violated: if their company creates a need for five PhDs of some type, those slots (and thus the beginning of the intended work) may take months
to fill!

National security also motivates principled conservative support for public higher education. The looming conflict with Russia formed the backdrop to founding the NSF in 1947, the conservation PDEs currently taught to graduate students across many fields were invented in the '50s by NSF-funded researchers; the intention being to get nuke-tipped missiles from fields in Kansas to the red square! The internet and GPS both got their start and the majority of their early development as military projects. Ike, Kennedy, and Nixon all took steps to increase STEM education funding-in the name of America's cold war needs. On a national note that nonetheless has ideological bearing on decisions we make in CA, the scientific and defense communities are horrified at the current GOP inconsistency between desires for military prowess and higher education funding policy.

In short, if California were to invest an arbitrarily large amount in public higher education, the point of diminishing returns would eventually be reached. But we are not even close to that point with our current spending, and the startups born out of so many UC campuses and their hungry seeking of the best-trained graduates are a demonstration that the Golden State is getting an appreciable return on its higher
education investment! Because of the return produced, there was ultimately no justification, not even a "budget crisis", to slash this investment in the state's future. Some of you may say that the funding will be restored as soon as the economy recovers and tax revenues increase-but without this investment, that recovery will never happen.